Writing in the San/d: Autoethnography among Indigenous Southern Africans (Crossroads in Qualitative Inquiry)

The San/Bushmen are one of the most studied people in anthropology, subjects of research going back one hundred years, of documentaries, and even of popular movies (The Gods Must Be Crazy). This intriguing new work on the San is a team-based ethnography, collaborative (one of the writers is married to a member of the community), reflexive (the authors become characters in the book themselves), and literary (with poetry, dialogue, interviews, photography, and first person accounts, as well as traditional ethnographic description). In this book, South Africans are studying other South Africans, in a new environment in which many San are no longer hunter gatherers, but are activist and engaged in cultural tourism. It will be an exciting counterpoint to traditional ethnographies and stories about the San people, for anthropologists and Africanists.

Keyan G. Tomaselli is professor and chair of Culture, Communication and Media Studies (CCMS) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. He has written extensively on his Kalahari research in Visual Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Critical Arts and Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies. He is author of Appropriating Images: The Semiotics of Visual Representation.